"Neapolitan scholar and Prussian pastor alike, in Berlin’s account of them, move towards the frontier of just such a relativism. They do so because, in tendency if not in letter, their thought (as does Mill’s) denies the existence of any permanent human nature. Variable cultures so shape the different needs and dispositions of their members that no common moral standard is applicable to the species. But after affirming – even applauding – the intransigence of this rejection of ‘the central concept of the Western tradition from the Greeks to Aquinas, from the Renaissance to Grotius, Spinoza, Locke’, Berlin then typically mitigates or retracts it. If The Crooked Timber of Humanity strikes one new note, in fact, it is in the strength of its assurance that Vico or Herder were not after all relativists: ‘this idée reçue seems to me now to be a widespread error, which, I must admit, I have in the past perpetrated myself.’ The reason, Berlin explains, is that however diverse or incompatible cultures may be, ‘their variety cannot be unlimited, for the nature of men, however various and subject to change, must possess some generic nature if it is to be called human at all.’ Values can thus be plural and conflictual, yet at the same time perfectly objective, because, despite everything, a common human nature does exist, in which they all ultimately come to rest. The intention of this solution is clear – to bar the path from the liberal notion of pluralism to the nihilist consequences of relativism. But it falls short of accomplishing it. The human species could exhibit a range of common characteristics, including a capacity for mutual communication (on which Berlin lays special stress), without these necessarily having any moral import; and if the social codes it develops conflict, value-choices between them will on any definition be subjective. In one of his most acute essays, Berlin taxed Montesquieu with a central inconsistency. On the one hand, De l’Esprit des Lois showed that human laws and morals vary according to material and cultural circumstances, while on the other it upheld the existence of an absolute justice independent of time and place. Berlin comments that ‘the only link between the two doctrines is their common libertarian purpose.’ This is a good description of his own construction. For the best of motives, Berlin wishes to defend cultural pluralism without renouncing moral universalism. It is a more demanding task than he appears to believe."